Friday, January 07, 2005

"You will find my power then."

It's become a routine. Every day I do a search for news of the CIA's agent provocateur, Davao City bomber Michael Meiring. An FBI team whisked Meiring out of a Philippine hospital and back to the US, two legs lighter, after an explosive device prematurely detonated in his hotel room, and - significantly - before he could face awkward questions and pesky charges. (If the name sounds unfamiliar, search this site for earlier posts.)

I'd thought that now the Philippines has formally asked the United States for assistance in returning Meiring, the story might finally break in the US media. But no. Nothing. And to be perfectly honest, I really didn't expect anything else. The Meiring case is a difficult story to tell in America, as it makes no sense within the official paradigm of the "War on Terror."

The most recent American coverage - the only coverage I see - is Houston's KHOU-TV's Dec 2 investigative report by "Channel 11's News Defenders," which uncovered Meiring's Houston connection.

(Let's note something here: meaningful investigative work in the US mainstream media, such as it exists today, is likely to be relentlessly local. When journalists, working away from the principal media hubs and outlets, incidentally strike a matter of interest to the National Security State, their work is more likely to proceed under the radar, uninterrupted by superiors who also double as assets of the alphabet agencies, and may even find an audience.)

The KHOU-TV report is fascinating, in part for what it doesn't say. For instance, there is no mention of Meiring's links to US intelligence, nor of the FBI team which flew to Mindanao just days after his maiming to spirit him out of the country. Rather, it plays up his connection to the Moro National Liberation Front, a "sometime Muslim rebel army."

This calls to mind how Chief Counsel Robert Blakey steered the House Select Committee on Assassinations towards the Mafia-killed-Kennedy finding, failing to see - and not wanting to see - that organized crime was just one component of the supra-legal association of military-intelligence, criminal and business interests that had worked together for years, and conspired together to murder the President. For instance, Blakey played up Jack Ruby's criminal ties, while Ruby's deep links to the Dallas police, the FBI and the government's protected drug trade were roundly ignored. So to with Meiring: he is regarded in the American report as an associate of Islamic terrorists, while his relationship to US intelligence is unmentionable.

Also fascinating is the telephone encounter with Meiring, who obviously knew "Channel 11's News Defenders" had no idea what they'd gotten themselves into: "If this harms me in any way, you will find my power then, and you'll find out who I am. But I will come for you. You harm me I will not let you off the hook."

By the way, 9/11 activists, here's an example that demands to be vigorously copied: last March, "the citizen-led Mindanao Truth Commission, after almost nine months of conducting investigations, has claimed that the government itself could be the possible leading perpetrator in the bombings all over the island that have led to the death of 95 people and the wounding of 490 others."

“From the data that we have gathered, the State leads the probable suspects … taking account of the statements and affidavits that were issued by government insiders themselves,” said Dr. Robinson Montalba, member of the MTC.

The MTC apparently put weight on the testimonies of junior officers of the Armed Forces involved in the ill-fated mutiny at the Oakwood Hotel in Makati City, wherein they claimed that they were ordered by their superiors to lob grenades at mosques in Davao City. The MTC said they found substantial evidence that the AFP indeed ordered a special operation to bomb mosques.

The group led by LTSG Antonio Trillanes IV claimed that the Armed Forces is involved in the selling of firearms and ammunitions to the New Peoples Army, the Abu Sayyaf and the MILF.

They said, too, that former Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes and Intelligence Service of the AFP chief Brig. Gen. Victor Corpus were responsible for the March 4 airport and the April 2 Sasa Wharf bombings with the intention of putting the blame on the MILF, thus effectively tagging it as a terrorist group and pave the way for military financial and logistical aid from the US.

...

The MTC also named the CIA, citing reports that is used Michael Terrence Meiring to fake terror bombings in the Philippines. Meiring, supposedly a treasure hunter, figured in a bombing at a budget hotel here. He suddenly disappeared from the country, aided by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The MTC said Meiring’s sudden flight could be taken as an indication of guilt. It further noted that the American could be among persons or groups in possession of bombs of such intensity that can rip concrete buildings and cause massive destruction.

I guess you could say it's like Agatha Christie's Mousetrap. The murderer is the last person you'd expect. But after such a long run, does it really still surprise?

1158 Comments:

i don't know the veracity of this but it has the ring of being knowledgeable. It is from the Pravda forums:

On February 21, Rosanna Halong, wife of notorious Abu Sayyaf leader Abu Sabaya, phoned Radyo Agong dxMD in Koronodel City and announced that her husband was in on a CIA plot to break Sabah away from Malaysia and fuse it with Mindanao to form an independent country - a plot long popular with CIA-linked treasure hunters like Gould and North.

Halong insisted her husband hatched his version with Jeffrey Schilling. Sabaya took Schilling captive for eight months in the jungle after he suspected the Berkeley grad was a CIA agent. Schilling swore the mix-up was the fault of his friendship with another Zamboanga-based African-American named Shaun, a former Marine the rebels had met earlier.

Perhaps he was also a CIA agent, Schilling said matter-of-factly, and due to my association with him they assumed I was also a CIA agent.

Stories like the following explain why locals assume that every Yankee is a spook in a country where Philippine Senator Aquilino Pimentel describes the Abu Sayyaf as a CIA monster. A group, he points out, whose original members were organized, funded and trained by Ronald Reagan s secret agents in the 1980s and sent to Afghanistan to help kick out the Russians. Twenty years ago, that skullduggery was overseen by exactly the kind of people Michael Meiring hung out with, in exactly the same part of the country.

Four days before Sabaya s wife said her man was an American puppet, the Daily Zamboanga Times reported on a new and improved super-power puppet army in Mindanao. The term Bangsamoro as used below means Filipino Muslim people :

Another great post.And interesting comment bin'dare.I am sure that the last country in the world that will ever figure out that the US sponsors terrorism (including such acts as 9/11) is the US itself.

That the CIA is involved in covered operations destabilizing countries and sowing hatred between different ethnicities all over the world, is no surprise at all to people awake about international politics. What surprises me, is, that there is a Citizens´truth Commission wich is able to investigate deeply inside the Military and publish its findings in a major outlet.If this is true, then there is more democratic freedom in the Phillipines right now, than there is in Europe.

Any citizens truth commission for 9/11 (there were quite a few European victims in the WTC as well) or one investigating the Madrid attacks, would be totally ridiculed by mainline media and politics and would have no access whatsoever to any police or military personell.The private groups investigating those events of course are either ridiculed as crazies or demonized as right-wing anti-american or anti-semitic hate-mongerers. In mainline media leftwing or liberal authors of 9/11 research books in Germany were shown next to actual Neo-Nazis, inspite of those book-authors having never met those Neo-Nazis or even communicated with them.This is the most efficient propaganda ploy to discredit a person in Germany, put him or her in affiliation with a Neo-Nazi.

This b.t.w. was also done to the FDP (libertarian) politician Möllemann shortly before he was suicided; you mentioned him in one of your posts.

I never was a fan of him, since the FDP is very neo-liberal pro-business party.Möllemann was a politician we call "ein Stehaufmännchen". No matter how often he was punched out, he would always come up again, like a toy-clown with weight in his bottom. He was involved in quite a few political scandals, like helping relatives in their business by using his official position as a government minister. While all these scandals were all over the press none of them seemed to hurt his political carreer.

Until one day in an election race he published a pamphlet and distributed it to thousands of German households, where he criticized the current brutal politics of Ariel Sharon towards the Palestinians. He also accused him of being a war-criminal. And he accused Michel Friedman a CDU politician and a talk-show host on German public TV to be Mr Sharons main-apologizer and spokesman in Germany, who justified atrocities against the Palestinians.

This pamphlet was breaking a taboo in German politics, so Möllemann had to finance the pamphlet himself without help from his party, and he did so by using money from a foreign bank-account he owned. The money probably came from Arab business-partners. And investigators called it "black (illegal) money".

Mölleman had been investigated many times before for all kinds of scandals, so an investigation was nothing new to him. On the day Mr Möllemann jumped to his death the police was searching his house and office allegedly to find out more about his "black money accounts".

In recent years many German politicians have been accused of being in charge of "black money" accounts, financing their election-campaigns. Most of them have come out of the investigations unscathed, without their political carreers beinng hampered very much, none of the others has committed suicide.

I read the pamphlet, and in my opinion there was not a single word in it, you could construe of being antisemitic. There was no generalisation of guilt by association towards any jewish people or towards all of Israel. Only Sharon and his politics were criticized and Mr Friedmann for justifying these politics.Mr Friedmann was at that time second in command of the "Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland"(the central council of Jews in Germany).However whenever this pamphlet is mentioned in the press, it is called "the antisemitic flier". And when the scandal broke the webforum of the FDP was full of people pretending to be antsemites. Many commentators and even leftwing cartoonists said how sickening the whole thing was and that now all the brown shit in Germany(meaning the antisemites) was coming out of their holes.

While Mr Möllemann was pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab, most probably rather more because of his business-associations than because of any humanitarian considerations, since he wasn´t the type for them, one cannot find a single real antisemitic utterance of him anywhere(as far as I know at least). But since he now was associated with "brown shit", he lost all his political posts in his party and even was about to be thrown out. There were, however, rumours he was planning to form a new party of pro-Muslim renegates from other parties, hoping to get the votes of Muslim immegrants in Germany.(One of them might have been Mr Karsli, a prominent Muslim German and member of the Bundestag, who was thrown out of the Green-party for criticizing Israel too much.)

One funny thing in the whole sad affair was, that only a few weeks after the Mölleman suicide, Mr Friedmann was indicted of soliciting Ukrainian prostitutes, who had been trafficked into Germany by the Ukrainian Mafia and now Mr Friedmann´s house was searched because the police had some alledged evidence that he had financial dealings with those women-traffickers. Mr Friedmann lost his post in the Zentralrat at least and for a while even his TV-show. But on TV he is back.He seems to be a "Stehaufmännchen" just like Möllemann used to be.

Erlenda, thank you for the interesting perspective from Germany, and for the background on Möllemann.

It was refreshing to see the Mindanao press report the findings of the Citizen's Truth Commission as a straight-faced news story. As you suggest, that would be unlikely to happen in Europe or North America. But the Dark Actors playing Games seem to get sloppy away from the gaze of the "First World." Their thinking - if it has even reached that level of concern - seems to be, If many of the residents of Davao City, or the mutinous junior officers of the Philippine military, come to see the "war on terror" as a wicked farce, so what? Since when did their opinion matter? So long as the bubble of ignorance around America remains secure.

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